I rushed this episode out for listeners who do not read the web site. I wanted to let those listeners know about the coming change in feeds, in case of any disruptions. I am hoping there are no problems, but if someone has one, I want them to have the heads up and to know I will help where I can if there are any feed hiccups.

I discuss some listener feedback, namely Pete’s recommendation of the Gundo plugin for vim and Tim’s move from nano to vim.

For the rest of the episode, I extemporize on lessons I have learned about the benefit of choosing between a hard or soft aspect as someone who used to almost unilaterally always approach situations with a firm set to his jaw.

For some reason, I decided to step back from any integrated development environments at work and just use my preferred power editor of choice, vim. If you are unfamiliar, an IDE is a very powerful tool, like an assistant constantly at your elbow to remind you of how to code better, how to use libraries, and kick off any number of tasks like builds, deploys, and debugging. Early in my career, I resisted them, feeling that I should be able to be productive with a loose collection of individual tools. I finally caved when I read Martin Fowler’s “Refactoring” and realized that the one thing the IDEs at the time could do that my much beloved power editor plus command line could not was tear through a project’s code base, transforming the code smartly, based on an actual understanding of how source files fit together. The alternative was to use tools like sed, grep and awk to essentially do global search and replaces across many, many files. To do so, you had to explicitly write out what you wanted changed, character by character. In an IDE, you could select a menu option–extract method, introduce parameter, rename class, etc.–and provide very lightweight input like new names and new locations, depending on how you are re-factoring the code.

As much as I have been using IDEs for the past handful of years, part of me still felt they were a little intellectually lazy. I’ll be the first to admit that feeling is fairly irrational but that is how I have felt. I guess that a quiet part of me feels I should be skilled enough and deeply embedded in the languages, tools and projects I use to make the loose collection of tools approach work, strengthening my abilities as a coder as I work by being much more actively in the mix of those tools. Sort of how I feel about having a manual transmission on my car rather than an automatic. Except the clutch is n-th dimensional and I have to use all five fingers of my right hand, plus a few toes of the corresponding foot, to manipulate the stick through the gear changes.

I have to say, I am enjoying engaging deeply with my power editor of choice. Even though I took a break from coding professionally at my last job for about two years, I still used vim for any and all of my text writing and editing needs. Since the last time I used vim for coding on a regular basis, the biggest difference is how much more mature and robust the plugin ecosystem has become. While I still supplement vim’s incredibly powerful and efficient text manipulating capability with tools to search, check and build code, and more, a lot of very passionate folks have written some very nice glue code to allow those tools to be invoked from within vim and to interact with the way the edtior thinks about text and files.

I have been sharing some updates as I noodle around with my vim set up, focused on the editor’s main configuration file, .vimrc. In response to one of those posts, a friend, Jed, asked if I’d write a post about the plugins I use. I am more than happy to comply. If you are curious, you can read along at the github repo I created to house and share my hacking on my .vimrc. I have tried to comment the various files I use to explain my thought process and pay forward the many, many tricks I have found in recent days to make working with vim that much more pleasant than it is already.

First and foremost, there are at least a few ways now to automatically install and manage plugins, a capability that was sorely lacking even a few years back. Of those tools, I use vundle. I like it because it only requires a one time manual install then self manages updates of itself as well as plugins. It provides a really nice set of commands within vim, and in editor help explaining them, to search, install and clean up unneeded plugins. My main .vimrc simply sources a supplemental file, vundle.vim, that both interacts with vundle and itemizes my current raft of plugins.

I have a bunch of language specific plugins, I’ll forego discussing those, for now. The other, more general plugins are both more likely to be of interest to any random reader and contribute the most value, and joy, to my use of vim on a daily basis.

The first plugin I’ll recommend is airline. I have long had a custom status line in vim, one I configure to be always present. It showed a few useful things but projects like airline and powerline improve on this massively and make it possible to have a very slick looking set up. I use the patched powerline fonts, explained and linked to in the airline docs, to gild the lily that is the info rich display of this plugin. The readme at airline’s github project is its own best sales pitch, I encourage you to give it a read. I like it even more for being a vim native re-write of the original powerline plugin. It demonstrates just how incredibly powerful vim’s own scripting environment has become.

Another backbone of my toolset is exuberant ctags. This is a unix program that digests source code for any number of languages and builds a database of tags. That database allows a programmer to quickly jump around a code base, from reference to declaration. vim has long supported integration with ctags so that if you have an appropriate database built and accessible, jumping to a function declaration is only a hot key away. If my aging memory is right, this support predates most if not all of the current popular IDEs. I use the plugin easytags which allows vim to continuously refresh my ctags databases as I work. I pair that with the plugin Tagbar which allows me to open a split frame that uses ctags to present a code structure aware outline view of any source file on which I am working. Further, Tagbar integrates with airline, enriching my status line with more contextual info about where I am within any particular segment of code.

I use two plugins from github user scrooloose, NERDTree and Syntastic. The first brings in a file explorer that is way more powerful and easy to use than the already pretty nice explorer built into vim. The second integrates any number of standalone programming language syntax checkers, like jshint and Java Checkstyle. That integration allows me to jump around my sources, seeing where I have slightly junky code I might want to clean up or an actual break I definitely need to fix well before it hits a compiler or a deployed application.

I just added a tool called fugitive. Mostly I pulled it in to see my current working git branch in airline. It supports invoking git, the whole hawg of distributed version control tools, from within vim but I have barely scratched the surface of that. I am still creeping towards the deep end of git at present, at present trying to use more interactive adds to selectively commit not just whole files I’ve changed, but collections of fragments of files that are related, separating them from other changes in those same files I want to save for a subsequent commit, for a separate reason. Being able to use vim to select those chunks to build up more smartly commit sets is intensely appealing while still slightly daunting.

Up to this point, if you are a coder, you may be thinking that all these plugins do is approach but not quite compete with a modern IDE. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree, as I said, these plugins just make existing tools easier to keep at the periphery of where I exert the vast majority of my focus every day. I have such deeply ingrained muscle memory for vim that I can create and change text far more effortless with it than even the best editor offered by the best IDE. I have tried “vim” bindings in some IDEs and even an abomination that yokes vim directly to Eclipse but all they have done is remind me of what I love about vim.

There is one last plugin that I feel is the most compelling response to the refactoring support available in packages like Eclipse and IntelliJ. For geeks of a certain age, tools like grep and sed are equal parts comfortable and frustrating. They are so responsive to sifting through masses of files yet so demanding in the exactitude of their use. A few years back, a colleague introduced me to a kinder, gentler alternative specifically for coders, ack. ack combines the expression power of grep with a better understanding of the peculiarities of source code and programming language syntax.

ack.vim brings that useful and useable code searching into vim. In this case, search is only half the picture. vim supports macros, not in the sense of scripting or snippet expansion, but the ability to record and play back key strokes. Everything vim does can be invoked without taking your hands off the keyboard. I feel this is vim’s best, most under appreciated feature. Imagine searching for some repetitive fixture in your code you feel must change, something thorny enough to require ack to confidently spot all instances of it. Now, couple that, through this plugin, with the ability to repeatedly and correctly apply that transform, not just something superficial, but a complex interaction with every single occurrence you unearth. Using vim, ack and ack.vim may not be as simple as picking from a few menu options but it also isn’t anywhere near as constrained. I’ve used macros to work over related sections of text, multiple lines together, not just a line or two around a simple declaration.

I’ve only been applying this latest deliberateness to my use of vim for a few weeks. My hope and fear is that there is so much more to explore. Hope in that I already feel I have finally found a combination and integration of tools capable of giving any IDE a run for its money. Fear in that these waters run very deep indeed and my ability to plumb them is only so great.

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